Space History: Young Whipple's passion becomes profession

From Fred Whipple's perspective, the future world would solve the problems of energy and food, and not just on planet Earth.

Whipple, born in November 1906, was one of many contributors whose predictions were sealed in a 100-year time capsule, circa 1963. Scheduled to be opened in 2063, Whipple foresaw a positive future, one full of hope and change and sometimes underlined with a bit of humorous whimsy.

The prognostications, published in "The Collected Contributions of Fred L. Whipple, Volume Two: The Space Age and Other Writings" (SAO/1972), include: "Control of fusion in 1977 and the use of ordinary hydrogen in 1995 led soon to a comparatively infinite power supply at relatively low cost. Hence, the deserts of antiquity became the major food producers for the world. The inland seas and the Bay of Bengal are now largely covered with floating cities, and the connection across the Atlantic is expected by 2100."

He pointed out that while "water is scarce on Mars, the atmospheric pressure and oxygen content have been raised sufficiently to permit outdoor work with only a simple face mask." The planet, he said, "now raises adequate food for its 700,000 inhabitants." The red planet wasn't getting much tourism, though, because the trip from Earth was "rather expensive except for business."

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Conversely, on the moon, he pointed out the "cost of maintaining an atmosphere" was "huge." Nevertheless, Earth's satellite "is amazingly popular as a pleasure resort and as a medical center. Medical advance, however, has so reduced illness and ambulatory disabilities that practically only the senile and those with psychogenic diseases now utilize the space and lunar hospitals."

Whipple foresaw "life expectancy extended to 150 years," and that "only 2 or 3 recalcitrant strains of cancer require continued medical research." In 1988, he said scientists would develop a "shadex" to change skin and hair color, which would become "a major factor in eliminating racial tensions." In addition, he believed the "major socio-medical problems" of 2063 would be "suicide and addiction to Martian spore dust." And, he felt, some enterprising scientist would develop "an earth ring like Saturn's, but made of aluminum foil," and that would eliminate "the Van Allen (radiation) Belts and happily (force) most astronomical observation into deep space."

Half a century from now, citizens of the Earth, and maybe even those populating the solar system, will know the veracity of Whipple's predictions. He wouldn't have even made them, however, if his childhood dream had come true. If not for suffering childhood polio, Whipple might have been a ranked tennis player. But when the disease cut short his sports hopes, and even spared his life, a high school astronomy course ignited a new passion, according to the website amazing-space.stsci.edu.

"My interest in space travel began in my teens," Whipple wrote in the preface to "The Collected Contributions of Fred L. Whipple, Vol. II." Over his 97 years, that passion was his profession. He discovered five comets and an asteroid, now named Whipple, his International Space Hall of Fame (ISHF) biography states. He was one of the first to discern that stars other than our sun emit radio waves.

Of his accomplishments ("The Collected Contributions of Fred L. Whipple" is more than 2,000 pages long), he may be best known for creating a worldwide optical network early in the Cold War to track satellites. A Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory release dated June 11, 1963, reported that Whipple set up 12 cameras on six continents and "photographed more than 60,000 satellite transits."

Whipple had a remarkable talent for math. Born and bred in Iowa, amazing-space.stsci.edu said the boy could "add up customer's [sic] purchases in his head" at the grocery store where he worked. He studied in Los Angeles at Occidental College and UCLA, and, his ISHF biography said, "while still a graduate student helped map the orbit of Pluto, discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930." He joined the Harvard Observatory in 1931, "inspecting sky survey photographic plates," manconquersspace.com documented. He also pored over the plates looking for evidence of comets.

During World War II, Whipple was project director at the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development's Radio Research Laboratory. A biography in the New Mexico Museum of Space History archives said he guided "the development of 'Window,' the Confusion Reflectors which helped Allied bombers penetrate the German radar screens." Amazing-space.stsci.edu touted that Whipple's device sliced "up shreds of aluminum that, when dropped from planes, confused German radar."

Whipple taught astronomy at UC, Stanford and Harvard, chaired Harvard's astronomy department from 1949-56, and joined the SAO in 1955.

"Dr. Whipple built the moribund group he inherited into one of the leading scientific organizations of the world," Donald Menzel, director emeritus of the Harvard College Observatory, wrote in the foreword to "The Collected Contributions of Fred L. Whipple."

In 1950, Whipple proposed that comets were nothing more than dirty snowballs, the ISHF biography said. "He argued that comets were primarily ice with some rock mixed in, rather than materials such as sand held together by gravity, as was the more accepted belief at the time. Dr. Whipple believed that as a comet approached a star, light from the star vaporized ice in the comet's nucleus." Solar winds then pushed the vaporized material into the familiar tail.

"His explanation covered why comets have a tail, something other astronomers had not been able to satisfactorily explain," amazing-space.stsci.edu said.

"Whipple was proven correct in 1986, when the European Space Agency's Giotto spacecraft took close-up photographs of Haley's comet," said the ISHF biography.

Michael Shinabery is an education specialist and humanities scholar with the New Mexico Museum of Space History. E-mail him at Michael.shinabery@state.nm.us.